With the Tide
by Serrafina
Summary: Kara makes a new friend. Sort of.


Title: With the Tide

Disclaimer: not mine.

Betas: nazkey and callmebombshell on livejournal.

Written for the New Fandom challenge on the LJ comm writeandgripe. Feedback appreciated.

* * *

Sayid was the first person on the island to meet Kara Thrace, and he was almost the last.

She faced death at his hands the first day they met, it's true. (An honest mistake, she'll say a long time later. She'll laugh and he won't smile) He had been fetching water when he found her. He heard her before he saw her, staggering noisily through the brush in the strangest sort of jumpsuit he had ever seen.

But even though he heard her coming and was prepared—and yes they did end up with his knife pressed to her throat—really he wasn't to blame since she attacked him first. He dropped the water bottles to the ground just as this strange woman launched herself at him with a near-feral look in her eyes.

Sayid was ready, and even though her hands were moving for his neck he easily fell with her and twisted them so that she landed hard on the ground with his blade held steady against her throat.

The next moment was oddly still as they lay there. Sayid took in the feel of her body flush against his even as that wild glint in her eyes began to fade just a little. If she was winded from the impact, she did not show it.

And then she laughed. It wasn't a pleasant laugh, though, neither nice nor funny. It was the laugh of a person whose existence was raw and filled with nothing but jagged edges.

It was a laugh that Sayid knew well.

"Who are you?" he said.

"Don't you know?" she replied, laughing again.

"What's your name?"

"You mean there's actually a toaster who hasn't heard all about Kara Thrace and her special destiny?"

Sayid filed this away to figure out later. "How did you get here?"

"Oh, didn't you see? I crashed."

That, plus her total disregard for her own well-being, was what convinced Sayid to ease up on the knife just a little. Eventually they got past the introductions and she decided he was neither a Cylon nor her "spirit guide," and he decided she was probably not an Other.

"We're on an island," he told her, "though I can't say much else."

She frowned and seemed to think better of whatever it was she was going to say. "How did _you_ get here?"

He lifted one eyebrow. "I crashed."

Less than an hour later, Kara almost lost her life for the second time since setting foot on the island, and this time it really wasn't Sayid's fault. He was guiding her through the dense underbrush, on the way to the beach when his keen ears picked up the sound of trees groaning and crashing accompanied by an ominous mechanical clicking.

Sayid knew what that was, and he knew that it was coming closer.

"Run!" he shouted to his curious companion. He rushed towards her, grabbing her arm as she merely stood there, nonplussed. Intent on dragging her out of the line of fire if need be, Sayid was surprised to find her nigh immovable.

"Run," she said skeptically, "from what?"

Sayid was anxiously scanning the forest, trying to determine how much longer they had. "From a monster made of thick, black smoke that destroys anything in its path."

She raised one eyebrow at him. "Run…from smoke? I think I'll stay."

* * *

The third time Kara tries and fails to light a fire, she concedes that Sayid Jarrah might have his uses.

The first few nights on the island had been spent on the beach, lying stretched out on the sand with the dark sky above her. The others huddled around campfires and under tarps.

They gazed at the horizon, waiting for a sail. She stared up at the stars and waited to wake up, waited to hear Lee's voice in her ear—_come back_, he'd say, _you come back_.

She heard his voice every night and every night she closed her eyes and couldn't reply.

* * *

Sayid studied her carefully during the walk to the beach. She was remarkably blasé about the whole thing. Either she had encountered the smoke monster before (and twice lived to tell the tale) or had known horrors so dark and strange as to render a creature made of black smoke a mere oddity. Either way, he didn't trust her.

Still, at least it was going better than his first meeting with Rousseau.

He didn't tell the others what had happened with the monster, even as he rushed through what little he knew about her arrival. She didn't seem inclined to talk anyway, staring silently out at the water. Like with her laugh, he had seen that stare before.

This time, however, she smiled, and that single unguarded moment made him reevaluate, reconsider his initial assessment of her.

Sayid kept track of her movements throughout the rest of the waning day. This was made easy, if unnerving, by the fact that shortly after avoiding most of their questions and asking only a few of her own, she sat down in the sand, just beyond the reach of the tide.

Every time he looked back at her, she was in the same position—knees bent in front of her and bare hands gripping at the sand. She ignored just about everyone, although she did accept the fish that Hurley brought her. Even that did not hold her attention long, and soon enough she was back to staring at the rising tide as though it held some great and terrible power over her.

She watched it with more fear now than she had shown when faced with the truly hellish. As he watched her unflinching profile from dozen feet away, Sayid could not help remembering the way his own blood had raced through his veins as he stood transfixed in the forest, torn between the need to survive and the urge to _know_.

His companion, on the other hand, had felt no need to run as she stared into the face of the gathering storm.

She didn't run now either, when Sayid approached.

"How did you do that?" he said without preamble.

"Do what?" She still didn't look at him.

"You know what I'm talking about. The smoke monster has never spared anyone before."

She shrugged, finally twisting around to look up at him. "I'm special." She turned back to the ocean. "Besides, the bad guys never really want me dead. Just want…." She trailed off, and after a few moments it became clear that she had no intention of finishing.

He left her there for awhile, mind still turning over the bizarre scene that had unfolded in the monster-made clearing, the way that ever-shifting column of black smoke had hesitated and filled the air in front of her, still for just a moment, just long enough for her to look right at it and say, without the slightest flinch, _"I'm not afraid anymore."_

Later, he woke in the night and stepped out where he had a clear view of the beach and the night sky and her, still there. Lying on her back now, and even in the dark he could tell that her eyes were open and gazing up at the stars.

He had no way of knowing how long she had lain like this, but somehow he felt certain that it had been some time. Something about her in this moment gave him pause, however, and he almost held his breath as he stood a ways away, unwilling to fracture the quiet night.

He hadn't known what he was waiting for, but a few minutes later she stood, quickly and gracefully. She stripped off her boots and rubber suit with military precision and took off across the sand. As she ran, she pulled her tank tops over her head, discarding them carelessly behind her.

Sayid knew what was coming, and he averted his eyes, turning to walk back to his bed. When he heard a splash, however, he could not resist twisting back around.

Her head popped up above the water, short hair now a dark cap in the moonlight. She swam with long, easy strokes, a pale shape diving into the dark water. Sayid watched her for a moment longer before turning his back and walking away.

* * *

It's because of yesterday's rain, Kara argues, that she can't get the wood to light. She went through Basic. She knows how to light a fire, and if these branches weren't so frakking wet she'd be proving that right about now.

Instead, she's sitting across from Sayid as he calmly and quietly rubs two sticks together until a thin pillar of smoke curls through the air between them.

Kara scowls as he gets the sticks to burn. She really hates being bested at anything, especially by him. If only she had some booze, she could get him drunk and finally manage to make a fool of him.

But she doesn't, so she just says "right" and goes in search of a sharp stick for barbecuing.

His eyes track her movements as she digs around in the brush. She's been on the island less than a week, but already she knows this about Sayid Jarrah: he will never let anyone he considers a threat out of his sight—and oh boy, is she a threat.

The first few days, she was content to spend her days and nights taking in that delicious feeling of salt water waves that she'd never thought to experience again. By the fourth day, however, the lust for motion returned and she was planning to take off into the forest on her own when Sayid started following her. If he had been anyone else, she would have assumed he was (foolishly) concerned for her safety—as it was, she quickly worked out that he was more concerned she not go running to these 'Others' than she return safe and sound to their little beach haven.

It took too much effort to ditch his persistent ass, and besides, she really didn't know her way around. Every damn tree looked the same.

"So Jarrah," she says now, her back to him. "You can light a fire. What else can you do?"

She's distracted for a moment as she finds a good stick to be her skewer, but when she turns around to grin at him he's giving her that look that she's already seen one too many times. That look that says he's not buying any of her shit.

Still, she out-stubborns him (boy should learn some stamina) and soon enough they're engaged in a sort of competition, only neither of them know the rules.

"Favorite weapon?" he says.

"Outside of my Viper, give me a gun any day. You?"

"A knife is all I need."

She snorts and wishes they had anything stronger than water to drink. "Favorite way to kill a person?"

His quick answer tells her that he's thought about this before. "Snap the neck," he says. "Hands or feet. Clean and quick. You?"

She swallows the memories of a cage that looked like a home and her own personal tutorial on six ways to kill a man. She doesn't say that. He probably knows all of those ways anyway. "I'm a traditionalist. Bullet between the eyes."

"One thing you always try to carry with you? And don't say a gun—that's cheating."

She scowls.

Eventually the game winds down. Neither of them really wants to talk about anything other than weapons and tactics, so they settle into an easy silence. Kara certainly doesn't mind the unspoken agreement not to talk about their feelings or whatever. After meeting some of the other people marooned on this frakking island, Kara's all talked out.

As the fire slowly dies down, Kara finds her eyes drifting skywards, as is her habit. She can't see many stars through the trees, and definitely can't make out any of those godsdamned constellations.

It's a relief, and maybe the reason she proposed this little escapade in the first place. She's grateful for one night without staring up at the light from her increasingly improbable failures, but a perverse part of her misses that beautiful piece of home.

"You'll have to make do without a midnight swim tonight," he says.

When she looks back at him, she's not surprised that he knows about her new ritual, or that he's caught her with her guard down as she looks for those too-familiar stars.

She snorts and lies back on her elbows, stretched out on the hard earth.

When she closes her eyes, she can see them all again, see the _Galactica's_ halls and the swirling clouds drawing her in. And she knows that this night, like every night, she'll hear that refrain of _Kara, come back, you come back_.

Then Sayid's voice breaks the stillness between them, and she realizes that it's not like every other night.

"There are some questions I've asked myself since I got stuck on this island. Some are more important than others. You don't know how you got here, and maybe when you walk into the woods you don't know where you're going. But the real question, the question you have to ask yourself, is _Are you coming back?_"

Kara opens her eyes and doesn't see the stars but she knows they're there. And this time, she knows the answer.


End file.
